Scenes from the 2016 Jehovah’s Witnesses convention. The first few minutes are tedious, but once you’re past that it gets interesting. The thought control is blatant.
Hostage to evangelical loonies who just can’t face reality, the Republican Party’s platform is on track to be the most deranged agenda ever. Worse, because we’re talking about crazy people, the platform is unlikely to be forgotten the very minute the convention ends. In times past, the grown-ups would have stepped-in to shut-down the loonies; not this go-round, though.
Though several states have banned so-called ‘conversion therapy,’ for the reason that the overwhelming majority of scientists believe gender identity and sexual orientation are hard-wired before birth, and conversion therapy is psychologically harmful, Tony Perkins has persuaded the party to consider a plank in support of it.
The platform calls for reversal of the Supreme Court decision upholding same-sex marriage.
The platform includes a plank permitting the Bible to be used to teach history.
As long-time readers are aware, I grew up in Detroit and attended a high school in the downtown area. Since we then lived in a western suburb, I rode a bus from the outskirts to the city’s center every day for years, and I could see that the city was dying. When I left Detroit to go to college, I left for keeps.
I attended Michigan Tech, a mining and engineering about as far north as it is possible to go and remain in the United States.
I’ve wondered through the years if the root of the affection I’ve always felt for the U.P. lies in its contrast with Detroit, which is noisy, dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden. It’s not as if I’m a knotty-pine kind of guy, and personally shot that moose, though it wouldn’t be a huge scandal if I had; everybody hunts in the U.P.
The only two counties in the Upper Peninsula which haven’t lost population over the last two decades are Houghton and Marquette — the homes, respectively, of Michigan Tech and Northern Michigan University. The big industries were timber and mining, and both of those have been in decline for a long time; the winters are too harsh to support a lot of tourism or agriculture.
The theater where I saw Jaws has closed.
Lake Superior is the world’s largest freshwater lake. Carved by glaciers, it ranges up to more than 1300-feet deep and it’s coastline is more than 1700-miles long. Its rocky shoreline once hosted several places of aboriginal worship, and it isn’t difficult to understand why. Imagine standing at night on the peak on the left of the next picture, billions of stars overhead, when the northern lights come up.
OK, back to work.
I think Abraham was a sick man and that he responded to voices allowing him to abuse his son. I think the story of God giving his only begotten is long, long mental illness that bipeds are still struggling with since the caves.
Amen. An ethical system which rests upon the (bogus) tale of a man so emasculated and debased that he’ll betray his family on command is sick, and only the sick will follow it.
On this date in 1054, a supernova exploded in the area of what is now the Crab Nebula. For 2-years, there were three great lights in the sky: The sun, the moon, and the supernova. We know this because this most extraordinary cosmic event was recorded by Chinese and Arabic astronomers. Pictographs have been discovered in the American southwest and in South America, as well, which seem to document the supernova.
But in all the area then controlled by the Roman church there are no pictographs, nor a single scrap of paper in any museum, library, or monastery, which alludes to the sight.
In the Western world, curiosity and thought had stopped. The writings of Epicurus, the greatest mind of the ancient world, had been destroyed; portions of a few of his letters would be discovered in the Vatican library centuries later. A single copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things was buried in the recesses of a monastery library in southern Germany, forgotten and untouched for almost a millennia. The writings of Aristotle were fugitives protected by Muslim scholars. Other texts of the Greek flowering, the foundation of the West, were hidden in an Irish cave.
On this Independence Day, then — as al Qaeda and ISIS close schools throughout the Middle East and reprise Charlemagne’s summary execution of all who think, and as American Holy Men try to undo the progress of science, whore themselves to Donald Trump, and choke on expressions of sympathy for those slaughtered in Orlando — we should recognize that thought is the kernel of all human progress and resolve to protect first, always, and to the last ditch, the independence of the human mind.
